Borys Kit wrote:Zach Helm, who garnered acclaim for penning Stranger Than Fiction, has been tapped to write Columbia’s reimagining of Jumanji.

Matt Tolmach and Bill Teitler are producing the project, which is a new adaptation of the Chris Van Allsburg book. The tome, first published in 1981, was previously a 1995 movie directed by Joe Johnston that starred Robin Wiliams and Kirsten Dunst. Ted Field and Mike Weber are exec producing the new project.

The movie, blending light comedy and family adventure, told of a board game come to life as two kids discover the supernatural game and release a man trapped in there decades earlier. They also unleash jungle forces and must team up with the man to quell the game’s powerful magic.

The 2005 Jon Favreau-directed film Zathura was a sequel of sorts.

Word of a remake came early this summer when Sony execs said they were developing the project as “an update for the present."

Helm has proven to have a whimsical touch with Stranger Than Fiction and his Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium, the latter of which he directed. He recently did rewrite work on The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, another comedic adventure movie that stars Ben Stiller and will be released Dec. 25, 2013.

Anita Busch wrote:EXCLUSIVE: Scott Rosenberg has just been tapped to do a rewrite on the redo of Jumanji for Columbia Pictures. The project is considered a high priority for the studio as it plan to have the film set for release on Christmas Day next year. The project, produced by Matt Tolmach and Bill Teitler, is said to be a re-imagination of the original Chris Van Allsburg book about a board game that comes to life.

Rosenberg has written for both the small and big screen. The first season of Zoo based on the 2012 novel of the same name by James Patterson and Michael Ledwidge was just completed for CBS which he developed, wrote and executive produced with Josh Appelbaum, Andre Nemec and Jeff Pinkner. In fact, Pinkner is going to consult on the Jumanji script with Rosenberg. Ted Field and Mike Weber are executive producing.

Rosenberg’s credits are very well known, and he is versatile in comedy and action and also is adept at adapting books, which makes him kind of the perfect scribe for Jumanji since the project encompasses all three of those skill sets. He has written everything from Beautiful Girls, Things To Do In Denver When You’re Dead, High Fidelity to Gone In Sixty Seconds and Grasshopper Jungle (a YA novel about high school teenagers who fight for their lives during the apocalypse).

Mike Fleming Jrand Patrick Hipes wrote:EXCLUSIVE: There’s an action pitch that Rawson Marshall Thurber is writing and will direct that is generating a serious bidding war, with multiple seven-figure offers on the table. Dwayne Johnson is attached to star in the project, which is being described as a Die Hard in China-type star vehicle for The Rock, where it becomes one man against extraordinary circumstances and is set in the Middle Kingdom. Beau Flynn is the producer.

Legendary and Universal have made a seven-figure offer, we’re hearing, as have Sony and Paramount. New Line is also circling this. It’s very possible that this auction will be concluded by the holiday, probably by tomorrow. The bidding becomes another recent example where studios are really willing to step up for the right package.

Thurber (Dodgeball, We’re The Millers) and Johnson just teamed on New Line’s buddy comedy Central Intelligence co-starring Kevin Hart which comes out June 17. Flynn and The Rock have worked together several times including on 2014’s Hercules, last year’s big summer actioner San Andreas and currently on the Baywatch redo.

THR:Hollywood's New Problem: Sequels Moviegoers Don't Want"2016 has proven to be a very tough battleground, and the landscape has been littered with a series of sequels that have come up short and thus call into question the entire notion of the inherent appeal of non-original, franchise-based content," says one analyst.

sequels, sagas, stand-alone movies... what people really want are just good movies with good stories... meaning a satisfying story with a beginning, a middle, AND AN END. it's all fine and good to set up the next film in the franchise, but not at the expense of the story you're currently telling. remakes and sequels are usually just lazy rehashes of the previous film, with a few small differences thrown in. audiences are getting wise to that, not to mention, a lot of them are sequels to films that weren't very good in the first place, and people remember the first film sucked, so why go see another one? and the franchise films have become nothing but an excuse to make the next film in the series. that's why the last spiderman series failed, they put more thought and effort into how to set up the next 2 or 3 films instead of developing a worthy story for the film they were actually making. avengers has done a better job, so it's doing better. i still haven't seen batman vs superman, but it sounds like it wasn't quite as successful, and that will probably show up in the next film or films in that series. if you're making a "saga", you need to have a payoff eventually. otherwise you get a Lost situation, the audience eventually gets fatigue waiting for some resolution to take place.

Josh Lyons wrote:Here’s a bit of news that fits perfectly: Brett Ratner and James Packer are developing a biopic based on the life of Alexey Pajitnov, the Russian video game designer and computer engineer who created the iconic video game Tetris in their currently UNTITLED TETRIS PROJECT. Ratner and Packer are producing through their RatPac Entertainment.

In the vein of The Social Network, the story details the career of Pajitnov, who first developed Tetris with the help of Dmitry Pavlovsky and Vadim Gerasimov in 1984 in the communist-run USSR. Pajitnov was working for a Soviet-funded research and development center in Moscow when he developed the first version of the puzzle game, which began to spread throughout the region–initially exchanged between computer programmers.

As Tetris grew in popularity, being upgraded and adapted for various gaming devices and systems, the rights to the game became the crux of multiple complicated legal battles that spanned across the globe. The battles became so heated, in fact, that they threatened to destabilize relationships between governments. Following a controversial court ruling, Nintendo gained the legal right to sell the game, and as a result, Tetris was sold with every Game Boy console in America. Pajitnov, who moved to America in 1991, did not see a dime for his creation until 1996.

That same year, GameSpot named Pajitnov the fourth most influential computer game developer of all time, while IGN later cited him as “the ultimate video game one-hit wonder.” He went on to develop games for Microsoft.

Between the success of The Social Network and the remarkable–and still untold–true history of Tetris’s origins, there’s certainly a market for a film like this. The game has instant name recognition even with non-game enthusiasts. Not to mention the current geo-political situation between Russia and the West, which makes the story all the more timely.

Tetris isn’t the only iconic game that’s getting an origin story film. Big Beach Films recently announced it was developing The Monopolists, which recounts the scandalous story of the Parker Brothers, who became household names for their board game Monopoly–which they may or may not have stolen.

Producers are currently looking for a screenwriter to adapt the Tetris story for the screen.

THE MONOPOLISTSObsession, Fury, and the Scandal Behind the World’s Favorite Board Game

Beth Elderkin wrote:The key word here is “continuation,” which likely means it won’t be a direct sequel. It’s probably going to be a broader part of the Jumanji cinematic universe, acknowledging the events of the past while also being its own story. Sort of like how Jurassic World is technically part of the Jurassic Park franchise but also totally not.